Künstlers in paradise
(Book)

"There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed that fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America. An ill-timed visit forces twentysomething New Yorker Julian to shelter in place in Venice Beach with his glamorous and eccentric ninety-three-year-old grandmother, Mamie Künstler, and her inscrutable housekeeper. To pass the time, Mamie regales Julian with stories of her adolescent adventures among the émigré elite, from tennis lessons with Arnold Schoenberg to a romance with Greta Garbo. During his unexpected extended stay in his grandmother's crumbling domain, Julian undergoes his own personal quest as he reckons with the trajectory of the life he thought he wanted and what role he will choose to play in it all"--,Provided by publisher.

Julian Künstler comes from New York City to L.A. like many a lost twenty-something: to find a job writing in the entertainment industry. But this is 2020 and his temporary visit turns into an extended stay, trapped by the lockdown in a little house in Venice with his glamorous, eccentric, and ancient grandmother. Ninety-three-years old, Mamie came to Los Angeles from Vienna at eleven with her parents in 1939 among a wave of Jewish musicians, directors, and intellectuals escaping Hitler. As the months roll on, she begins to tell Julian her stories of the eminent emigres she's known and the magical world they inhabited as their old world was destroyed--people like Arnold Schoenberg, Christopher Isherwood, and Greta Garbo. Not quite all her stories, however. The pandemic isolates Julian from his world, but from Mamie he learns of the world that came before him and how much the past holds of the future. A tender, sharply wrought comic novel about exile, the power of stories handed down and handed on, and the power of stories held secretly in the heart.